The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for producing a food product having the appearance of the shelled meat of various shellfish, for molding and applying a coloring simulating the natural color of the product, produced mainly from a paste of ground fish meat.
It is known in the prior art to make a simulated shellfish, such as shrimp, crab claws, lobster and abalone, from a fish paste. For example, a paste of ground fish meat has been formed into a flat sheet, cut into thin bar-like shapes, gathered together and cooked, and colored to form bars having the appearance of crab legs (Kanikamaboko, for example). This type of technology is described in Japanese patent provisional publication No. 60-180564 laid open Sept. 14, 1985 and in our copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 769,175 filed Aug. 26, 1985.
In addition, U.S. Pat. No. 4,303,008 issued on Dec. 1, 1981 to Hice et al. describes a method and apparatus for comminuting small pieces of a food product into a paste form, injecting this paste under pressure into molds with high thermal conductivity, heating the paste while it is kept at high pressure, and then removing the food product from the molds.
In accordance with this U.S. patent, the paste must be injected into the molds under pressure and then kept at high pressure during the heating process, thus requiring a system wherein the mold compression and the pressure are maintained, and also producing a food product which is too uniform in shape to resemble the actual shelled meat of shellfish, consequently failing to make the food product sufficiently appetizing.
To color the surface of such a food product with a food coloring to reproduce the natural color of the real shellfish, it has been common practise to wrap the shaped paste in a polyethylene film, the inner side of the film having been coated with a red food coloring, and then boil or steam the product so as to cook and transfer the coloring to the paste.
Although it has been sufficient to simply shape the fish paste into bars or cylinders and cut it into appropriate lengths, up until this invention there has been no method and apparatus for processing ground fish meat in order to produce fish-paste products having the true appearance of the shelled meat of shrimp, crab claws, lobster, and other shellfish.
While the prior art color transfer technique described above is useful in the coloring of bar-shaped products, it cannot be successfully applied to foods having intricate shapes such as simulated shrimps which have joints, for the food coloring cannot be evenly transferred, by the prior art method, to such irregular surfaces to faithfully reproduce the appearance of shrimp and the like.
It is a general object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for forming and coloring a simulated shellfish food product such as a shrimp, a claw of a crab, or the like, which makes basic improvements on the described prior art systems.
It is another object to provide means for continuous production of such products by moving molds in accordance with the progress of the production procedure, and apparatus to perform secondary heating of the food product in order to achieve a product with a much closer resemblance to the actual shelled meat of shellfish.